Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

Relief from ‘conflict’ expressed in terms of more or less obvious caricature she gets from her ‘character scenes’. The less detached her emotions are the less she allows facts and objects to collaborate.

… while she is exceptionally gifted to deal with her emotions there is somewhere a hiatus … independence has led her to a blank wall and she doesn’t know how to get through it …

Helen Beauclerck, with whom Dulac lived, pronounced it ‘a not very lucky horoscope, but most interesting’.

Gluck was extremely pleased to be met by Nesta at Plumpton station three weeks later. As soon as she got back, and in the middle of all her frayed and confused feelings, Wilfrid Greene gave her a commission which she could not, out of friendship, refuse. He was resigning as Principal of the Working Men’s College, after years of service, and had been asked to present a drawing of himself to the College.

I would not want to be drawn by anyone but you … and I am writing to know whether (1) you would honour me by accepting the commission and (2) whether you would please us by coming to stay here for a few days and then and there accomplishing it …4

When she arrived at his house ‘The Wilderness’ in Dorking, Rayner Goddard, who became Chief Justice two years later, was staying too. She thought him very nice and both he and Lord Greene were enthusiastic about the drawing she did and they all made large bonfires together in the garden.

Her peace and concentration were broken by a phone call to ‘The Wilderness’ from Edith. She was in great distress because Nesta had gone to see Nora in London and ‘been beastly’ about Gluck. Nora had then had a row with Edith – presumably about the impending move. Nesta phoned Gluck too but made no mention of the visit.

On 6 October Gluck moved into the Chantry House. It was understandable but it was to prove most damaging. She went there largely because she did not know where else to go or what to do. Her suffering because of love took away her confidence and happiness. She had declared her love so often, so passionately and wholeheartedly. It was not independence that led her to a blank wall but a broken heart. And her painting suffered. She faded from the public eye and produced very little. Others were to suffer too, including Edith. It is hard to be on the receiving end of a rebound from such love. Unlike Nesta, Gluck could not let go – not of things, not of arguments, nor issues, nor the past. In old age she wrote of her YouWe days in a shaky hand:

Count not the years

The laughter or the tears

What was, still is, and ever shall so be;

Count only this – my heart belongs to thee.

Sentiments that she stored within her, like letters in a shoebox.

PART THREE

THE FACTS OF LIFE

1945–1978

FOURTEEN

THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE

In Steyning Gluck moved into an established home. The Heald sisters, Nora and Edith Shackleton, bought the Chantry House in February 1934 when Edith was forty-nine and Nora was fifty-one. They intended well-earned, elegant country living for their middle age. The house was empty, near-derelict and covered in ivy with broken windows and leaking roofs and the gardens were overgrown. They rented a place nearby, Smugglers Cottage, and worked at Chantry’s complete renovation. The original sixteenth-century building had been the home of priests from the chantry chapel in Steyning Church. It was enlarged in the style of a Georgian country house in the early eighteenth century. Nora and Edith opened it up and made it light and warm. They took out the back staircase, put in new walls, windows and floors, ripped out the old larders, had a new kitchen built, new bathrooms, a new roof. They moved in at the end of May 1934. ‘Tidy at last’ was the caption in their photograph album for the ‘before and after’ transformation of the house. They took with them their antique furniture, paintings, glassware, rare carpets, rugs, ceramics, books, and huge collection of gramophone records. By summer Mr Hole, the gardener, was gathering figs and pears from the pruned fruit trees in the now orderly walled orchard.

Nora spent week nights in London in a flat above The Lady offices, Edith worked from home. There were house parties most weekends where the conversation, food and wine were reputed to be good. Edith complained that most of the household decisions were left to her, but there were servants to do the chores and it was to all appearances a harmonious and enjoyable life. They took frequent holidays together, motoring in Europe, chauffeured by their nephew Ivan, staying in inns and sightseeing.

Both sisters were successful and highly respected journalists at a time when it was exceptional for women to have such careers. Edith began, in the early 1900s, as a freelancer with stories in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle, where her brother Ivan was assistant editor. She used her mother’s name, Shackleton. (The family was distantly related to Ernest Shackleton, the antarctic explorer.) By her early twenties Edith was a special correspondent on Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard – she was the first woman to go into the Press gallery at the House of Lords and she covered events in Paris during the First World War, the struggles for Irish independence and the setting up of a republic by the Sinn Fein in southern Ireland in 1919. During the 1920s both she and the poet Edward Shanks worked as leader writers on the Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’.

‘I sometimes suppress the fact that I write leaders for a daily paper when being condescendingly questioned by the inhabitants of the outer world’ she wrote in an essay, ‘Women in Fleet Street’,1

rather than face the disbelief or alarm which follows. Though journalism is one of the professions in which women and men get equal rates of pay for